Physics
Scientific paper
Feb 2002
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2002amjph..70..119b&link_type=abstract
American Journal of Physics, Volume 70, Issue 2, pp. 119-127 (2002).
Physics
4
Biographies, Tributes, Personal Notes, And Obituaries, Educational Aids, Kinetic And Transport Theory Of Gases, Quantum Mechanics, Cosmology
Scientific paper
Three scientists exemplified the cautious behavior that we might like all scientists to display: indeed, they were so critical of their own ideas that they risked losing credit for them. Nevertheless, they finally earned at least as much fame as they deserved, leaving historians to wonder about what they really believed. Maxwell initially rejected the kinetic theory of gases because two of its predictions disagreed with experiments; later he revived the theory, showed that one of those experiments had been misinterpreted, and eventually became known as one of the founders of the modern theory. Planck seems to have intended his 1900 quantum hypothesis as a mathematical device, not a physical discontinuity; later he limited it to the emission (not absorption) of radiation, thereby discovering ``zero-point energy.'' Eventually he accepted the physical quantum hypothesis and became known as its discoverer. Hubble (with Humason) established the distance-velocity law, which others used as a basis for the expanding universe theory; later he suggested that redshifts may not be due to motion and appeared to lean toward a static model in place of the expanding universe.
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